61 departments reporting live · updated recently
Know the A&E queue before you leave the house
We track 158 NHS emergency departments across all four UK nations, collecting live queue figures wherever a trust publishes them — so a ten-second check here can save you hours in a waiting room.
Location is looked up once in your browser — we never store it.
UK snapshot
full dashboard →Average wait
2 hr 1 min
People in queues
34
Quickest right now
Mid Ulster Hospital
Under most pressure
Hereford County Hospital
Figures republished from each trust's own public feed, as of our most recent collection run.
The queue league, right now
Both ends of the table — refreshed with every scrape of the trust feeds.
Shortest queues
Mid Ulster Hospital
Magherafelt · Northern Ireland · MIU
South Tyrone Hospital
Dungannon · Northern Ireland · MIU
Omagh Hospital and Primary Care Complex
Omagh · Northern Ireland · UTC
Downe Hospital
Downpatrick · Northern Ireland · UTC
Helston MIU
Helston · South West · MIU
Longest queues
Hereford County Hospital
Hereford · West Midlands
Antrim Area Hospital
Antrim · Northern Ireland
West Cumberland Hospital
Whitehaven · North West
Royal Victoria Hospital
Belfast · Northern Ireland
University Hospital Coventry
Coventry · Midlands
Pick your patch
Every region we cover, with the latest figures for each department inside it.
Birmingham & Solihull
4 departments · England
East Midlands
3 departments · England
East of England
4 departments · England
Kent
11 departments · England
London
18 departments · England
Midlands
11 departments · England
North East
2 departments · England
North West
19 departments · England
Northern Ireland
15 departments · Northern Ireland
Scotland
21 departments · Scotland
South East
8 departments · England
South West
23 departments · England
Wales
8 departments · Wales
West Midlands
8 departments · England
Yorkshire
3 departments · England
Tell us where you are
A postcode or one tap on the location button — nothing is saved, nothing follows you around.
Scan the queues nearby
Every department within reach, ordered by distance, each with its current wait alongside.
Trade minutes for miles
Sometimes the hospital fifteen minutes further out clears its queue three hours sooner. Now you'll know.
When the waiting room fills up
A week of typical national demand, hour by hour. The teal patches — early mornings especially — are when departments breathe easiest.
Typical weekly A&E demand pattern: departments are calmest between 6am and 9am every day, busiest on Monday mornings, on weekday evenings from 6pm, and especially on Friday and Saturday nights.
Where every number comes from
Every figure is either taken straight from an NHS-published page or clearly labelled as an estimate — nothing is dressed up as something it isn't.
Trust dashboards, unaltered
Many trusts publish a live waiting-time page for their own patients. We collect those figures on a rolling cycle and show them exactly as published, with a timestamp on every reading.
Official statistics fill the gaps
Where no live feed exists, we show estimated typical waits derived from official performance statistics — NHS England's monthly figures and Public Health Scotland's weekly hospital-level data — always labelled as estimates, never dressed up as live data. Where there's no statistical basis either, we simply show no figure.
Independent by design
This site has no connection to the NHS — no funding, no endorsement, no data-sharing agreement. That independence is what lets us present every hospital on the same terms.
Asked all the time
The short version of what visitors want to know. Longer answers live in the guides.
As accurate as the source allows. Trust dashboards with a genuine live feed refresh every few minutes, and we republish their figures exactly as collected on our most recent run — each one carries a timestamp so you can see its age. Where a trust publishes no live feed, we show a clearly labelled estimate of the typical wait, derived from NHS England's monthly performance statistics, and where there's no basis for even that, we show no figure rather than guessing.
Two kinds of source: the live waiting-time dashboards that individual NHS trusts run for their own patients (we collect from feeds in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland), and official performance statistics — NHS England's monthly release and Public Health Scotland's weekly hospital-level open data — which we use to estimate typical waits where no live feed exists. Every hospital page names its source trust and links to the original page. NHS Wales withdrew its live feed and publishes no open hospital-level figures we can use, so Welsh hospitals currently show no estimate.
No — and this matters. A&E works on triage: a nurse assesses everyone shortly after arrival, and the sickest people go first regardless of the queue. The number on this site reflects the department's overall pace, which is useful for comparing hospitals, but your personal wait depends on how urgent your condition is judged to be and who else walks through the door after you.
The early morning, roughly 6am to 9am, is reliably the calmest window across the whole week. Demand climbs through the morning, stays high into the evening, and spikes hardest on Monday mornings and on Friday and Saturday nights. If your problem can safely wait a few hours, arriving at breakfast time rather than after dinner often halves the queue around you.
For anything life-threatening — chest pain, stroke signs, severe bleeding, serious breathing trouble — A&E (or 999) is the only right answer. For sprains, minor cuts, simple fractures, bites and small burns, an Urgent Treatment Centre or Minor Injuries Unit will usually treat you in a fraction of the time. If you're not sure which applies, call 111 first: they'll direct you, and can sometimes book you a timed arrival slot.
Type your postcode into the search box or tap the location icon. You'll get the fifteen closest tracked departments, ordered by distance, with each one's latest queue figure shown alongside — so you can judge whether a slightly longer drive buys you a much shorter wait. The lookup happens once in your browser and we never store your location.